• Providing more context to this year’s crop of running backs: Interesting names like Kaleb Johnson and Cameron Skattebo benefit from further diving into their numbers.
  
• Ashton Jeanty, unsurprisingly, thrives across the board: To be a potential top-10 pick in the NFL draft, a running back needs to have an elite profile with little to no weakness, which is the case with Jeanty.
  
• 2025 NFL Draft season is here: Try PFF's best-in-class Mock Draft Simulator and learn about 2025's top prospects while trading and drafting for your favorite NFL team.

Estimated reading time: 15 minutes

With the NFL draft right around the corner, the fantasy community is often significantly invested in the incoming rookie running back class, and there is a lot to sort out with this year’s incoming running back prospects. 

The 2025 rookie running back class has been hailed as one of the best in recent memory, and using our running back prospect model, the numbers back that up. This class has four running backs with a prospect score over 8.00, and one more (7.98) is right on the brink. That gives the top-five backs in this class the highest average prospect score (8.54) since the 2017 class (8.42)

• Overall percentile rank references all prospects included in the rookie running back model, which considers a player’s career college production and metrics to create a score-based guidance system to understand who these players are and what we can expect from them for fantasy. 
• This model includes 253 running back prospects dating back to 2017.
• Strengths are considered production datapoints where a particular running back scored the highest in comparison to the prospect pool dating back to 2017.
• Weaknesses are the areas where a particular running back scored well below the 50th percentile in that particular production category compared to the prospect pool since 2017.
• This article will be a spotlight on the top-six running backs on consensus big boards, with a look at some of the other standouts at the position using the same model coming soon.

ASHTON JEANTY, BOISE STATE

• No. 1 ranked running back on the PFF big board
• No. 1 running back on consensus big boards

Jeanty is the clear top running back in this class, both according to consensus boards and in our prospect model for fantasy purposes. As a potential top-10 pick, Jeanty makes the case as one of the top running back prospects of all-time, scoring elite marks when compared to past prospects. Jeanty is also in a rare cohort of running back prospects without any true weaknesses in his analytics profile.

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